Samsung rolled out the long awaited official Active 2 software update today with Tizen 5.5.0.1 R830XXU1CTH8 which supports ECG, fall detection, and more!
Samsung Health Monitor App- https://bit.ly/SamsungHealthMonitor
Samsung Galaxy Active 2 https://amzn.to/3i0T2XA
Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 https://amzn.to/2FO58X7
Facebook Gray Badges Ending October 29th
Today marks the last day for Facebook Gray Badges that often appear on business pages. It appears Facebook has decided the system is too easily abused and has decided to do away with it altogether. Blue checkmarks that often are seen on celebrity and big brand pages will remain intact.
Venmo Privacy Concerns
I noticed recently that Venmo by default publicly shows all your Venmo transactions. In other words, everyone can see your transactions, even people that are not your friends! Depending on what information you post in the comments, this can be a real privacy concern. Example, if you pay your landscaper and put your home address as a note, or your pay rent and put in your rental address.
Fortunately this is an easy fix with some privacy settings shown in the video capture below. When you have adjusted your current privacy settings, don’t forget to click past transactions and change all to private!
If you found this video useful send me a small Venmo!
Why couples should not have joint Facebook accounts with a spouse or significant other
Over the past decade I’ve seen couples sharing one joint Facebook account. This drives me nuts. At first, it was just a pet peeve, however after many years, and seeing life happen, it quickly became evident why this often well intended idea is a very bad idea. I think the idea behind this is often accountability, however a couple can both have their own accounts and use the same password and accomplish that. When you share an account who’s birthday do you choose? What about high school? I’ve noticed situations where a new boyfriend came into the picture who was controlling and added himself to the woman’s account. One of these was a high school classmate. She married him and sadly she got a brain tumor and passed away. It was not long afterwards before the husband who was effectively using his late wife’s Facebook account, began using it to message her friends for dates and eventually renamed the account and removed her all together! Recently a similar situation happened with my Aunt. She had her own FB account, and at some point they renamed it and her and her husband both were using it jointly, although he really didn’t post. After she passed away, instead of creating his own Facebook account and memorializing hers with Facebook, he took her name off the account within the first year and the day he announced his engagement! He later started going back and deleting personal posts she had made years prior to her relatives. Total disaster and good example why you should never share an account so yours can be memorialized for your loved ones.
The other obvious situation that can get nasty is divorce. When you have separate accounts, there is more legal accountability if a spouse tries to hack into the account.
Bottom line is simple. There is no reason to share an account and call it MikeandSally. Joint facebook accounts are also a violation of facebook terms of service. Use the same passwords if you want accountability. If you don’t trust your spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend enough to do this, you have much bigger issues.
Umbrella Website Design- Knoxville, TN
It appears another fly-by-night website design company has left Knoxville without notifying customers. Recently a customer contacted us for a redesign. After they were not able to reach Scott, we decided to visit the address listed on the website as of 6/9/2019- 10932 Murdock Dr, Suite 103-A and discovered from the current tenant that they had been there two years, and prior to that a wine business was there. They’ve not been at that address in years. If you have a website hosted by them, we highly suggest getting a copy of it and make sure you have access to your domain name.
Twitter API Suspensions affecting ManageFlitter StatusBrew and others
Twitter is apparently doing widespread API suspensions without any notice. ManagerFlitter and StatusBrew are affected as well as many others.
StatusBrew has stated that moving forward it will not support any follow/unfollow actions of any magnitude so apparently Twitter is pulling the plug on all third party applications that allow following/unfollowing.
Services like socialoomph.com that permit purging of tweets but not follow/unfollow functions appear to be functional. Removing the follow/unfollow functions of these third party apps will render them virtually useless in my opinion.
Kevin Garber CEO of ManageFlitter stated that the suspension came as a complete surprise and that Twitter had not expressed any concerns to them prior to the suspension.
This pattern of Twitter pulling the plug on Users/API’s without notice is very alarming. Personally I think it’s a poor business decision to pull the plug without any kind of notice on a service that millions of users are using. Communication and warnings are always vital and important to maintain a good business reputation.
Update 1:00pm EST on 1/31/2019- The API has been restored on StatusBrew after they removed the follow/unfollow actions in the Audience section permanently to comply with the updated Twitter policies.
If you are like me, this is the main reason you use these types of services to unfollow people who are inactive or who unfollow you, so this is a huge setback. I’ve used them to follow people who are fans of shows I’ve acted in with great success, so this is a big setback for Twitter. Unfortunately many people abuse the follow/unfollow feature and don’t target a legitimate audience.
Update 2:00am EST 2/1/2019 from ManageFlitter- They have placed restrictions on the Follow Feature functionality: for now, users are able to perform account searches in Power Mode however users will not be able to perform any follow actions manually within ManageFlitter or via the Remote Account Managers.
Follow functionality on Remote Account Management has been removed.
Update 2/2/2019-
Both ManageFlitter and Statusbew are down again after Twitter once again revoked their API access. Not a good sign! Twitter told ManageFlitter ” that ManageFlitter “has been found in violation of the Developer Agreement and Policy” … “… specifically, your app facilitates bulk and aggressive follow behavior, such as “follow churn.”
Unfortunately, follow churn is what most of these services are used for based upon my experience, so I believe their future is very uncertain.
Twitter has permanently revoked ManageFlitter’s API access per a most today. It was fun while it lasted! RIP ManageFlitter. I strongly suggest StatusBrew will suffer the same fate.
Due to the severity of this violation, as well as prior spam violations by your app, this app is permanently suspended and will not be restored. While you are eligible to apply for a developer account and register a new, compliant app, any apps that substantially duplicate the functionality of app ID xxxx will also be suspended.
Update: 2/20/2019: Manage Flitter has acknowledged it’s demise, however 3 weeks after the initial API revocation , StatusBrew is still telling users they are communicating with Twitter to get services restored and “The review process is expected to be complete this week, and our services for Twitter shall resume shortly after.” Even if that is true, when the service returns following/unfollowing options will be removing making the app useless IMHO.
For now Unfollow Spy still works for following/unfollowing https://www.unfollowspy.com/
Facebook Accounts Hacked? No, it was cloned!
Recently facebook accounts are being cloned or some people refer to this as “my facebook page was hacked”. You are not hacked, they are using information that you provide publicly. The cloned account sends friend invites to your existing friends on your real page. This problem is actually very easy to prevent from happening! They are able to send these requests from cloned facebook accounts because most people have their friends list exposed and are available publicly. You can go into your facebook privacy settings and change “who can see your friends list” to Only Me, and then your friends list is no longer available. There is no real reason why your friends list should be public anyway. Please share this article to help get the word out, this is a real problem on facebook currently! I also suggest limiting your past posts and turning off face recognition while you are in there!
Below is a viral facebook Hoax Message related to this. You can read more about this Facebook scam as well as my suggestions below on ABC11 here.
“Hi….I actually got another friend request from you yesterday…which I ignored so you may want to check your account. Hold your finger on the message until the forward button appears…then hit forward and all the people you want to forward too….I had to do the people individually. Good Luck!”
How to embed Google Street Maps photos to your website
The easiest way to display a 360 photo on your website or blog is to embed it from Google street maps. It is a similar process to embedding a Youtube video. Simply visit maps.google.com and search for your business. Click on the photos and then scroll down to the 360 photo that you want to embed. Once you have found the photo, click on the vertical ellipsis, aka three dots menu, and then click the embed a map tab. You will be able to select, small, medium, large or custom size for your embedded 360 photo from the drop down menu. Medium is selected by default. Copy the HTML iframe code to embed it to your website. If you are using wordpress make sure you are on the text tab and not visual. That’s it! Your website visitors can now enjoy your 360 photo across all devices.
Example of Embedded Google street maps photo-
Get Facebook likes after you boost a post
When you boost a post on Facebook, you can capitalize on your money spent by going back in and inviting everyone who liked the post to also like your page. It is likely relevant content and this has a high conversion rate. If you promote the page via Facebook to get likes, it can cost at least .25 cents per likes. My experience has been that a large number of people will accept the invite to like your page. It is a tedious task, but well worth your time to do it! This is a good way to get more likes on your page, and it costs nothing extra to do it!
OpenCart 2.3 and 1.5 Sort USPS Shipping Extensions
Opencart 2 Default Shipping Method- Express Mail!
If you are using opencart OpenCart 2.3 or 1.5.6 one of the biggest problems out of the box is how the USPS shipping is sorted! It picks one of the most expensive methods by default which is fine for tech savvy people, but after you oversee a store with a high volume of sales, you quickly see that some users are just “plain dumb” and don’t realize they can change the shipping method to something cheaper like USPS Retail Ground or Priority Mail. The result is twofold! First, many users just exit the site and don’t buy and you never know it. We found this out firsthand from shoppers responding to abandoned cart emails. Even worse, I saw a customer that authorized a over 100.00 shipping charge on a 100.00 order and even used paypal and saw it twice before finalizing the order! Obviously that results in more paperwork and refunding when the customer realizes what they have done. Fortunately, you can install an extension for Opencart to resolve this. I found one that just does the sort shipping, however I stumbled upon this one that also adds more USPS API Features and shipping methods and it also sorts the shipping during the checkout which makes it even more useful.
If you would like to see the sort shipping in action on Opencart 2.x, check out this recent site we designed for PyroCreations.com in Loudon, TN. Sorting the shipping methods has made a huge difference and hopefully OpenCart Founder Daniel Kerr will implement this into a future release, because this is pretty standard in e-commerce. The developer of the extension was also very courteous and had great service, which if you have worked in this industry for any length of time, you find out can be a problem sometimes! You can also checkout the extention on OpenCart 1.5x on my personal website www.actormikebiddle.com